That particular tech 'demo' has to be at least 4 or 5 years old now so I'm not sure why it's being touted as 'new' on GT There are better implementations of 'voxels' around these days as well. Also, a lot of the art in those scenes looks instanced (and poorly at that) so right there is probably a big reason why they can render such huge numbers (millions of the same object on screen don't really tell us a lot about real world capabilities!). I know it's a massive optimisation technique but why would you use instancing for something whose fundamental premise is to create uniqueness you might as well stick with polygons if you're going to do that.

[EDIT]Ah I see what's going on here now... they have a 'new' technology company called "Euclideon" and seem to be going down the same route as that physics addon card company that nVidia bought for a several hundred million and then pretty much cannibalised to death, and for naught. Even in the new video a lot of what they show appears to be instanced.

[EDIT 2]An article in New Scientists alludes to there being Patents Pending on this tech... ah here we go. It looks like the same application has been submitted to the Australian Patents Office a number of years running since about 2004. There are no publicly available details with regards the actualities of the Patent so I suspect what he's doing here is submitting applications to create a 'prior authorship' paper trail registered to the name of "Bruce Robert Dell" (through various agents including 'himself') rather than necessarily doing anything 'legit' in terms of registering the specifics of a proper Patentable discovery. I'm of the understand that whilst you can 'hide' certain details when an application is 'pending', there still has to be something available to enable disputes and resolutions of issues. Without that this seems to be sliding into the realms of "Patent trolling".

Hmm... been doing some reading up on this tech... it's not using 'voxels' but something called 'point clouds'. The tech itself appears to be a "search algorithm", a way to quickly parse the huge amounts of data point clouds can generate and not the data itself (although that would imply also including a data management system to go with the search algorithm).

It's apparent speed however seems to be down to one thing though and that's heavy use of instancing - it's the same technique we've see in plenty of other games, Euclideon just seem to have taken this to an extreme. So whilst the video shows a lot of detail (elements) on screen, which is obviously floating everyone's boat, they're overlooking the obvious - when you instance you reduce overheads, so the exact same element instanced one million times isn't the same as one million individual elements on screen.

It's all a bit fuzzy though precisely because there are no technical details in any of the interviews or material that's floating around on the Internet, everything is high speculative as a result. Which can't be doing them (Euclideon) any favours. It's one thing to generate 'buzz' about something, but quite another to incorrectly manage that so it gets out of control and makes the whole thing look like the promises of a snake-oil salesman.

It's difficult to properly research because they're being deliberately cagey about what they're doing and essentially selling their business with hyperbole and marketing speak. I mentioned above they're using point clouds... that's not quite true as it turns out that elsewhere in all their material they do make a few mentions of voxels and/or polygon data (point clouds being converted into polygonal data, or super high density scans being converted into a high-dense mesh). Overall I'm starting to wonder (I have a sneaky suspicion) if they're using some sort of 'fractal' based calculations that would explain the heavy, heavy use of instancing.

Re: the forum. I've not noticed that myself so check your mail and account setting just to make sure. Also check any spam filters and what have you see if it's being blocked. It might also be that if you don't visit a topic in "X" days it automatically stops sending to save mail/bandwidth etc.

Yep, no animation, no collision, physics, specular (although they do make a claim to the latter iirc), or any other 'shader' based SFX. From the point of view of their touting this for game development they really need to pull their socks up and stop insulting/antagonising the industry.

good points. the video shown on gt was quite smug imo, and yet as people are pointing out, they don't have a lot to show so far, at least not to the level of being serious competitors to nvidia and ati and their tech.